“A God is born.
Others die
The truth has neither come
nor gone:
only the mistake has changed”.

Fernando Pessoa

Art is full of mistakes for a purpose, like the famous story in which a man lost and sunstruck by the arsonist desert sun, stumbles upon a “beautiful virgin” in an oasis and tells her, according to Mr José de la Colina and Ilán Stavans, these self-comforting words: “tell me you are not an illusion, to which she answers: you are the illusion. And suddenly, the man disappears”.
The mistake is perhaps in asking for the truth from this illusion which is the man. The same happens with artists that invent truths to avenge the fact that, maybe, we are nothing more than a mistake of God.
To them, the artists, it may be best not to ask them in which moment of their lives they are governed by certainties. “ For if I am mistaken, I am”, says Saint Augustine, and who the hell am I to refute a saint as celebrated as Augustine of Hippo, who thought of this quote, to perhaps help me write this text about mistakes. And to make me fall into this sum of absurdities, in a text full of nonsense as deep as a well, and enjoy the justification of a man of God.
At the beginning of this erratum I wanted to dedicate the text to Christopher Columbus, the Genoese man that should be the patron saint of the mistaken, perhaps a more than legendary sailor of history, who arrived in America in 1492 thinking he had arrived somewhere else. And so, apart from the great mistake of discovering a land that had already been discovered by its own inhabitants, he made history for something he himself was unaware of. And it is thanks to this historical mistake that I am writing in this language or dialect, to perhaps state that if we have to speak, in any language or dialect, it is to point out that we do not understand each other and that we are starting to get to know each other through both sides of a telescope, thanks to his majesty, the mistake.
Actually, according to Amiel, we are never as unhappy with others as when we are unhappy with ourselves. The Swiss thinker stated that “the awareness of a mistake makes us impatient”. So impatient was the clever and harsh Amiel, that he fought his awareness for mistakes writing a “personal diary” of 17 thousand pages, in which he only used 42 calendars of his life. What more exorcism against the “error vacui”, against the blank page that is never mistaken before we decide to add some letters.
I have hunted for great thoughts of great men who whilst speaking about mistakes, believed not to make them; they believed to overcome them like a long jumper with his javelin. And, in reality, it is clear that between what the poet wanted to say, what he really said and what we thought he said, a mystery is hidden, and this for a start is a mistake about perceptions.
For example, when Nicolai Gogol wrote his formidable “dead souls”, friends, acquaintances and readers went to his house to express that with this novel he had demolished the czarism and the first one to be worried and even annoyed, was himself because he considered himself a czarist. At which breaking point, in which moment did a sort of ghost lead him to a personal mistake that would later be a collective certainty? History is not interested in the fact that the truth was born from a mistake, as we would say when we think of the beautiful literary work of this Russian writer.
The case of Gogol, whose character, Chichikov, seems to have mistaken his place of birth in the czarist Russia, as he seems more like a skilled Columbian bureaucrat, leads me to unwillingly accept, beyond his theories that I find doubtful, an idea, I repeat, of this grand writer called Sigmund Freud: “Every frustrated act, every act resulting from a mistake, expresses a hidden intention”. May Gogol forgive us.
There is a reason for the word recognize* to be so often associated with the word mistake. A word that in Greek means to go back and is a palindrome in Spanish, a word you can read from right to left like the rabbis, the printers and mirrors,.
“Recognizing” a “mistake”, is what is said joining these words, to point out something not many like to accept. It is perhaps why, artists resort to the pentimento, to paint over a painting they consider mistaken, but the beauty of the work of art on top is born from another work of art that the artist considers mistaken.
There are, of course, mistakes made on purpose, like in Carroll’s nonsense poetry, and also those encouraged by ideologies: “superior races”, “Manifest Destiny”, and it is in these last ones that the innocence of erring turns perverse, controllable and manipulated.
A struggle between the praise of the imagination and the obtuse rationality of the realist can be created with a story like the one that follows. I believe to have seen it in a film, but so as to not make any mistakes; I will say it was in a dream:
There is a hospital unit with many beds and patients. Only one of the patients has access to a window with views of the street. The man slides it half open and tells what is happening outside the hospital: a young redheaded woman crosses the road with a blue umbrella, two children kick a ball through the puddles, a very small nun like one in a Fellini film feeds the pigeons in the park, a couple kiss at the entrance of a café, an old postman stands before the bell…
One night the patient who tells these events to his companions of misfortune passes away and, of course, everyone wants to inherit his bed with views of the street. When the man to whom the bed is assigned, half opens the window, he discovers that there is only a brick wall that prevents anyone from seeing the scenery. I think there is nothing more close to a poet than the character of this story, it is someone able to make up, and nurture a mistake brought about by his condition of prisoner in the world, a condition that an unsatisfied man always denies.
After a story like this one, the realist who hates anything that is not tangible, he who does not believe that if life makes mistakes it is because any mistake can provide new possibilities to create, will look with contempt at what is not provable and he will then call on the priest and the barber of Don Quixote so that we do not keep on mistaking windmills for giants nor flocks of sheep for an army of soldiers, as if in that visual mistake, the concept of armies of the world being bundles of obtuse and obedient people would not intercede.
“No other means to prosper are faster than other people’s mistakes”, said Francis Bacon enigmatically, as he made his fortune as a lawyer, a job specialized in looking for the mistake in the other person.
I prefer the sentence of Albert Camus, of humanistic stamp, that states that “making someone suffer is the only way to make mistakes” and in another place in his reflections he states that the need to be right is the sign of a vulgar spirit. It would be worthwhile to add that mistake hunters always make me feel the personal uneasiness of one who risks making mistakes so as to explore new worlds and new hypothesis of them. I find it very pleasant to encounter an original mistake because most of the mistakes are very old and are almost always catalogued in the chapter of certainties. For example: that man is a superior being, created in the image and likeness of God. The assumption that we are similar to the creator does not speak very highly of him. Here is a mistake caused by religion and as old and fixed as the sun.
Let us continue to speculate, creating deformed mirrors of the truth, as this is supposed to happen in any errata. The fear of making mistakes paralyzes you. He who does not make mistakes is dead. As there is no adventure without the possibility of a mistake. The tightrope walker, who walks on a tight rope and looks down at the abysm, is the one that does not fear making mistakes because he already dedicates his life, like a philosopher, to a job of mistakes. He gets to the greater truth through the ways of doubt. The mistake is the strange flower in the garden, the one that grows without anyone’s encouragement.
However, despite all this, there is nothing more sad and pathetic, and we can see it every now and then in big forums and conferences, than two mistakes that refute each other with passion, than two absurdities that attack each other with brutal fervour while the truth, unaffected, remains silent. It might be this to which the sharp duke of Rochefoucauld referred, as he wrote with vitriol and with no fear of erring: “The arguments would not last very long if the mistake was only on one side”.
It is enough for me, as I made the mistake of accepting to write about this subject, to scribble an attempt of a poem:

THE STREET OF THE MISTAKE

Between the street of certainties
And the avenue of pride
I preferred to cross
The path of the mistake
There I found old
Unknown friends
I found the man
That thought it possible
To invent a mirror of ice
For the girls in the desert
The one who wanted to walk
Along three river banks
The one who thought of making
A coin with three faces
The one who believed his name indelible
Written in the water
The man who wanted
To leave his body at home
To go for a walk
Without its bothering presence
I preferred the little street
Of the mistaken
To the lounge of the certainties
I chased the confusing
Words of one
Who painted a tunnel in a wall
Of prison
To help his friends escape
The one who made mistakes calculating
Whist building
A bicycle of wind,
The failed artist that wanted
To taste with wine
The bread painted in the cupboard
Between the street of certainties
And the avenue of pride
I preferred to cross
Through the path of the mistake
There I found, still nervous,
The one who wanted to hide
A man about to be executed in a poem
The one who never knows what to answer
When someone asks “who is there”
The thief of impossibles,
The one who wanted to be his own rider
And went galloping in his madness,
The one who wanted to colour the vowels
And kiss the distance,
The blind one that did not declare
At customs the landscapes
He had in his touch
And only wanted to write a book
Made of smells and tastes,
The one who never hit the target with his bow
And is never spot on about the truth
Between the street of certainties
And the avenue of pride,
I preferred to cross
Through the path of the mistake
There I found old friends
That only read in books
The grace note of the errata.
In all those,
There is more truth
Than in the proven facts
Of our stupid history.